


Foster Son

by zzoaozz



Category: Neverwinter Nights II
Genre: Foster Parent/Adult Child Relationship, Game Spoilers, M/M, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-25 05:39:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/949271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zzoaozz/pseuds/zzoaozz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daeghun's life has been full of mistakes and regret.  Will fate give him one last chance to make it right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Foster Son

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very short fic, just a brief exploration of Daeghun's thoughts and feelings and then a single moment in time when destiny might change the course of his life. This was written after playing Neverwinter Nights II and its expansion Mask of the Betrayer through back to back. It may not make much sense for anyone who has not played the games, but there was always something there in the dialogue, something unspoken and intense between your player character and your foster father, Dhaegun.

Daeghun knew the moment he spoke he had made a mistake. The night of the attack had been trying and his foster son had been pushed past all patience. He had snapped at him to listen instead of questioning. Any other day, the boy would have taken the rebuke with no more than a tightening of muscles in the square jaw and deepening of the frown he wore far too often, but tonight was different. 

Surrounded by smoke and death and glowing with the bloodlust of his first battle, the boy had struck back. Glowing crimson eyes had hardened and his curving lips had drawn back in a sneer. 

“How about I beat the Hells out of you and we settle this right now?” 

His voice had been a low, melodious hiss revealing his heritage as much as the scarlet eyes and the ebony skin. He had felt the strange thrill of his elven blood responding instinctively to the drow, and more than that he had felt a stab of regret for the closeness they might have had if he had not kept pushing the child away. That regret was clear in his voice when he told his ward that he did not mean what he said. He had seen those eyes soften again. He was forgiven as he was always forgiven no matter how many times he had hurt him. 

He had only understood the true depths of that amazing gift when he had escaped the shadows to Crossroads Keep. He had tried to stay cold, to ignore the pride when he heard the loyalty and love those strangers held for the Knight-Captain as they were calling him. It had been hard, and it had been harder still to ignore the darker emotion he had been fighting since the boy had begun to become a man, especially when his coldness was met with such open relief and love. 

He was one of the rarer mixes of half-elf, human and wood elf. He was shorter than even your average mixed breed. The boy like most dark elves was tall and lithe. He had brought his long fingered hand, black as a starless night, up to his cheek and looked into his eyes. 

“I thought you were dead, father. I’m glad you’re here.” Then he had pulled him close into a hug resting his head on his shoulder and speaking softly against his ear just before he pulled away to consult with his advisers, “it will be easier to pay whatever price will be asked of me knowing that I am doing it for those I love most.” 

Then he was gone. After all he had done, all he had given, all the lives he had changed, he had disappeared beneath the rubble of the hidden temple beneath the Mere. Everyone assumed he was dead after a few days. Only he refused to believe that. He searched tirelessly until he found the ruins. He argued and cajoled until he got enough soldiers and volunteers to dig it out. They had uncovered those companions that had survived, Khelgar, Neeshka, and Sand who had been trapped in a golem shape so long that it had taken three other wizards and a high priest to dispel the transformation. Khelgar had sworn that he had seen gargoyles step out of thin air and steal the ‘KalachCha’ away. Most people dismissed it as wishful thinking or pain induced hallucinations and the other two could not corroborate it. He knew one thing the bodies they had found had been human and gnomish or long dead corpses, not elven. So he kept searching. 

Dhaegun woke up to a bitter wind and low dark clouds that covered the rising sun. Snow was the nagging warning of his weather sense, snow and more cold, deep, deadly cold. He would need to find shelter and the closest place would be home. He turned and headed back toward the empty place where the memories of the past waited to haunt him. Night was falling by the time he reached West Harbor so he was able to slip in unnoticed. He did not feel like dealing with Tarmas or Georg and their endless chatter. 

He built up a fire and sank into his chair in front of it letting the dancing flames hypnotize him. As they always did, memories of the past danced through his mind. Shayla smiled at him with her sweet and honest love, Esmerelle gazed from the shadows with red eyes that always seemed to be laughing at some secret he was not in on, and his foster son was always there no matter where he looked. The memories came too fast to sort, a tiny black baby crying softly in his arms, the angry wound in his chest healing as he watched, trusting eyes asking him why this and why that, big eyes shiny with tears asking him what Drow meant and why everyone hated him, those same eyes promising him with quiet intensity beyond his years that he would never be the evil thing that people expected. He had been so careful never to do harm when he could heal, never to say a hurtful word out of carelessness or cruelty. 

He sighed and closed his eyes, letting his chimeras take their own substance and spin themselves into the facets of his past. He stood in the backyard with his arms around the boy showing him how to sight along his thumb and pull the bow without losing the bead. How tall he had grown, he wondered, and as slender and strong as a young willow. He was washing away the blood from a deep gash in his back where someone he refused to name had cut him. His anger bloomed as fresh as it had been so long ago. How could anyone possibly wish to mar that midnight perfection. Then that day he could never forget, the day he looked at the boy he had raised and seen a man, a somber and lonely man, a man as beautiful as a statue, intelligent, kind, loving, and doomed to be reviled because the father he had never met and the mother who had died and left him in his keeping happened to have been born in the Underdark, slaves to a curse cast centuries ago. 

He had been heading to his room, it was late and he was tired. Something had caught his attention, some little sound, and he turned following it to the room on the end. He pushed the door open quietly not wanting to wake him if it was nothing and caught his breath. A man stood naked in the window with moonlight streaming over him. There was no mistaking him for a boy. The light glinted off the tear tracks on his sculpted cheeks. His long silver hair was loose and pushed back carelessly behind his sharply pointed ear. He was across the room before he knew it and the stranger of shadow and moonlight standing where his complex and often disturbing child had been turned to face him his eyes full of confusion and conflict. He had relived this moment a thousand times in his dreams with a thousand different outcomes. None of them were as cold and heartless as the derisive words that had fallen from his tongue in the waking world. 

He opened his eyes and spoke his name just to hear some sound other than the howl of the blizzard and the crackle of flames. When a low voice whispered his own back, he jumped from his chair and spun around. The door closed behind a tall figure dressed in silver and red armor that looked like nothing forged on earth.

“They told me you’ve been out searching for me since I was taken. Khelgar said you never gave up on me.”

He dropped a knapsack by the door and walked toward his foster father. He moved slowly and quietly, like a hunter trying not to startle a wild animal. He had grown more powerful, Daeghun could feel it from across the room, the restrained force in every movement, the sleeping power behind his eyes. Physically, he had been tempered by his journeys. His arms and chest were broader, more developed from weapons work and his legs and thighs strengthened by the many roads he had traveled. His hair was pulled back in a loose braid and the bangs curled on his forehead and around his ears appealingly. 

“I knew you were tougher than they thought.” His words sounded weak even to himself. 

“And that’s all?” He stopped just a step from the half-elf. “You looked for me to prove them wrong?” 

“No I,” he took a calming breath and spoke the truth before his lack of social skills could ruin the moment “I missed you. I wanted to tell you that I regret the distance between us.” He ran his hand through his hair absently, “You deserved a better parent than I.” 

“You weren’t the warmest father, but you’re the only one I had. You let me grow in my own way, taught me to stand on my own feet, to rely on myself. Who else did either one of us have?”

He half smiled and looked up into the crimson eyes. “We both survived, unless you’re a ghost.” He reached out and touched his chest lightly feeling the beat of his heart strong and real. He started to pull the hand back but a darker one curled around it holding it firmly in place. 

“I missed you too.” 

He shivered at the low, whispery voice. “Where were you?”

“Farther away than you would believe: Rashemon, the City of Judgement, a realm of shadow behind this one, other worlds, and places between worlds. I was cursed with the ghost of a spirit eater, fed on a fallen God, destroyed the dreaming coven of hags, and led a crusade to tear down the Wall of the Faithless. I struck deals with Chantea, demons from the hells, and Khelemvor. I earned the love of the most intriguing and gorgeous hagspawn you could imagine and a brilliant and beautiful red wizard, but I could not return his or her love because my heart chose another long, long ago.” 

“Another?” Dhaegun found himself pinned in place by the heat of the hand on his and the rhythmic voice. 

“Yes another, one forbidden to me by custom and race and perhaps by morality. In truth though, who are the people of this village or any mortal to declare right from wrong.” 

He licked his lips nervously. “Tell me who holds your heart.” 

“Don’t you know?”

“Should I?” 

“Yes, I think so.” 

“Tell me.” 

“Pehaps it is time I showed you.” 

Daeghun’s heart stopped in his chest as his foster son tilted his chin up and brought his head down covering his mouth with his own. He started to push him away but instead drew him close opening his mouth to the kiss he had ached for but dared not imagine taking. 

“This is wrong,” he muttered as he pulled back to gasp for breath, “you’re my son.”

“Foster son,” came the amused correction. “You yourself always made that point.”

“Yes. I did, didn’t I.” He closed his eyes and a made a choice. “Touch me.”


End file.
